Made of This
by breadandchoc
Summary: "She's becoming bolder in his dreams." Another post-movie Nika/47 AU. Rating will go up.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Had some free time and thought... ah why not. I'm probably just writing to an empty fandom by now but if I'm not, feedback is always appreciated.

Not part of the Courtship universe.

* * *

/

 _Sweet dreams are made of this_

 _Who am I to disagree_

 _I travel the world and the seven seas_

 _Everybody's looking for something_

\- Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams

/

She's becoming bolder in his dreams.

She could be a past target, just a ghost surfacing in his crystalline memory, except she doesn't feel like one. There is too much weight to her, everything in his dream dipping towards her as if she has gravity collapsed under her skin, more than just an image composed of facts and files. Her hair is dark and fierce, her skin is pale to the point of luminosity, and as she stretches above him, all naked curves and knowing body, he has to remind himself not to touch her. She has bait written all over her.

"Like that's ever stopped anyone." She smirks and pushes him down when he tries to raise himself up on his elbows. There is something shockingly red floating around her waist, trailing like silk or spilled blood. She rolls her eyes at him. "God, you're so morbid," she says. "Not everything is about firearms and shooting shit up, you know. By the way, I'm not wearing any panties this time either."

She moves her hips in a very deliberate way to make her point and Christ, but it feels impossibly real. Her smirk grows wider. "Enjoying yourself?"

He raises a hand to either push her off or pull her down, he doesn't know, because suddenly there is something in his hand that wasn't there before. They stare at it.

"Who are you?" he says. The woman looks back at him from the syringe. Her smile doesn't reach her eyes this time.

"Try again," she says, and then her hand is hot and urgent around the base of his head, pulling him up towards her or perhaps it is the other way around, and 47 wakes up.

/

His stack of notes is starting to grow.

There are ones on neat sheets of beige hotel paper: _Female, Eastern European, late twenties._ Also: _Five foot eight, brunette._

There are ones on plain squares of notepad slips: _Green eyes, tattoo on left cheek_. Also: _Knows my number_.

And now he adds one more, a pale pink scrap he's found in the glove compartment. It was once part of a takeaway menu, and the ink stipples onto the other side when he writes on the blank face: _Sexual overture, syringe._ The moon is swollen tonight, a bleached searchlight in that filters through the windscreen and turns the cheap paper translucent when he lifts it up so that he's seeing two things at once. Tofu dishes and a woman that his mind can't let go of. He wonders if he defused her with death or sleep.

He's still half-hard, the dream shifting restlessly under his skin, so he gives up on sleep for the night and goes to the boot to take out the two suitcases there. He disassembles and reassembles the M15 and .45s three times, and counts all the cold-shelled ammo three times more before dawn finally smears itself across the horizon in a dull blood-orange. He's a lot calmer when he starts the car up, but when he closes his eyes briefly before he turns the key, he thinks he still sees the outline of her, waiting.

/

He suspects that these dreams fall under the broad category of post-traumatic symptoms, but 47 has a stronger suspicion that actually reporting these night-time trips would push the Organisation over the strained limits of their patience. They have already been surprisingly tolerant with failure and Christ knows he has cost them enough in terms of rehabilitating him after his humiliating disaster in Moscow. The least he can do is to treat his mental deficiencies himself. He's not so ungrateful (or suicidal) that he is about to tell his employers that their investment has randomly developed a highly selective conscience in the shape of a dead woman who haunts him when he sleeps.

"You're so sure you killed me," she says. She sounds amused, but there is a bitterness that betrays her in the twist of her lips. She pats the ground next to her. "Come lie here with me."

He stands awkwardly over her, then compromises by sitting beside her, the flat of his palm on the ground next to her ear. They're on a roof, the concrete cool and smooth beneath his calluses. The dim shapes of other buildings peak around the edge of the roof in clustered smudges – Hong Kong, perhaps; or Bangkok.

Something oily and spiced lingers at the back of his throat like an itch, a precision of detail that is startling in this vague landscape.

"You and your perfect memory," the woman says, but she's smiling up at him. She is exquisite in detail as always, of course; his subconscious is tediously unsubtle when it comes to her. "I always wondered how you did that, remember everything. Don't you get tired?"

"I don't remember everything."

"Yeah, sure, that's what you say, and then it's all _dorogoi_ , you moved the gun three inches from where I left it; _dorogoi_ , didn't I say stay clear from the balcony so why are the doors unlatched; _dorogoi_ , my ties are blue, tell me you did not replace all of them with blue." She pauses. "Well, maybe I wanted you to notice that last one," she smirks.

"You changed my ties?" he says inanely, before the rest of him breaks out of shock and asks the far more urgent question, "I called you _dear_?"

Her eyes are innocence ringed in black. "Or _milyi_. Or _solnyshko._ Or _kotyonok._ " She looks up at him demurely through her eyelashes. "My favourite," she says, "was when you called me _moya zain'ka_."

His horror is wordless.

When she cracks, he can't tell if he's more relieved or exasperated. Her hair is longer this time, one dark strand curling close to her open mouth. He pulls it away unthinkingly, the easy familiarity of the gesture only jarring when he realizes, too late, what he's done. The woman subdues, her eyes still laughing. "I'm glad that entertained you," he tells her dryly. His ribs are suddenly tight around his lungs, and yet there is a strange desperate lightness caught inside, gunpowder and sparks. He watches as she turns her head, brushes her jaw against the edge of his knuckles.

"Yeah, well," she smiles against his fingers. "It's not often I remember things you don't. And you thought I was the impressionable one."

He had. He had thought he had thought _he had thought she was_ – but he can't go further, his head is buzzing like the aftermath of a blow. He can't stand it anymore.

"What were you?" he demands. A wrench low in his gut; he tries to sound calmer. "Target, cargo, bait – _anything._ Tell me. What were you?"

But his memory only closes her eyes. "Everything's fucked up," she says. "And you're still not asking the right question."

/

Before his coma, he was a lesser agent. He carried out his contracts but made mistakes, the most inexcusable of which was broadcast over international networks and which prompted him to spend three weeks on sniping practice in the period after he woke and before they gave him the clearance to leave. He still watches the Moscow footage sometimes, watches how the bullet grazed the target's temple, and thinks _wind pull_ and _adrenaline shakes_ and _poor control_ and other speculative, futile corrections like this that leaves him restless and angry. He never misses now, but his past failures itch at him in the same way that substandard bullet casings or inadequate scope specs irritate him: he wants to clear it from his inventory, rewrite his history. He knows he owes the Organisation everything for giving him a second chance that he wouldn't have granted himself.

He wonders now if they knew about the woman from his dreams. If she was a rival contractor, or perhaps just information – perhaps just a way to get to a buried target, too minor to be worth killing. 47 knows he is deluding himself – if he was as deeply involved with her as his dreams imply, then she was either a unstable leak at that had to be maintained for a critical time, in which case she is now dead; or she was a play, in which case she is now dead. Or it could have been purely personal. It is the least likely of the possibilities.

He just hopes he was the one that did it. He would have done it swiftly, as bloodlessly as possible; perhaps by lethal sedation. Then he thinks about the dream of her golden-lit and grinning wickedly down at him, the look in her eyes when she saw the syringe, and the sickness in his stomach is nearly a physical thing.

/

When he sees her in a street in Cairo, the shock hits him with all the force of a percussion grenade. Then the paralysis passes and he's after her, a swathe of spilled oranges and shouts behind him, subtlety and stealth be damned. It's just a side-glimpse of her by the corner of a stall, her head tilted back and laughing up at someone else, _someone else_ ; but it's in the way she holds her head: it has to be her.

47 pushes past the fools in his path, but when he gets there, there is nothing waiting but an empty space and a heart like a clenched fist pounding. The stall keeper stares at him, alarmed. It's one of those stalls for tourists – full of useless trinklets and the same hyper-coloured bracelets he sees everywhere in this district. It means nothing and there is nothing; he's chasing a ghost and _there is nothing left to fucking find_ -

 _\- Isn't there?_

47 stills. The noise of the street fades out, grows subdued under his heartbeat. And 47 doesn't think, doesn't think _at all_ ; he moves one step to the right, two steps forward. He keeps his gaze focused on the table, the bright beads, his mind precisely blank – and then for a blink, a photo-flash, a drawn breath: he sees her. Blurred and radiant and laughing up at him.

 _I was here with her_ , he thinks. The thoughts come violently, a drill splitting his head – _It was me, I was here with her, she was happy, it was the first time we – the first time – the first –_

"Help!" someone shouts. "Someone call a doctor, this man needs help!"

47 straightens up. He smiles at the stall keeper through the dim fog of pain, hopes it looks vaguely reassuring. From the look on the man's face, it probably isn't.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm fine, just a bad headache. If you'll excuse me."

He manages to walk away without really staggering.

Later that night, when he can think again without wanting to throw up, 47 considers the afternoon as carefully as executing a recon of enemy territory. It's time for him to deal with this problem.

/

He sees her again that night.

"You want to forget me," she accuses, before he even starts. She's hugging herself, her arms like barriers. Her hair is longer than he's ever seen it, dark strands brushing angrily across her collarbones as she shakes her head, "Fine, go ahead. Leave me. I'm sick of trying to get your attention all the time anyway!"

The conversation feels familiar; they've had it before. The words he had prepared when he was awake fall away without 47 even noticing. A forgotten anger opens up in him.

"Don't be dramatic," he says flatly. "You can't keep up, and I can't keep making allowances. You aren't my only priority."

"Priority? I'm not a fucking _contract_!"

"No," he says before he can stop himself. "I deal with targets, not messes. It's always damage control with you."

Her mouth falls open a little. Then she shuts it and turns her head away, a simple movement that removes the bottom of his stomach and hollows him out. This is familiar too: he's done this before, to her. The emptiness in him sharpens unpleasantly.

"Wait," he says. He reaches out to touch her, to ground himself, but she flinches and there is suddenly a distance between them in a way beyond mere geography: a treachery of his own dream. His hand falls back to his side, useless. "Listen-"

"You probably should forget me," she says quietly, still not looking at him. Her dragon stares at him, a fierce injury of black on her pale skin. "It's safer this way."

"I won't," he says. "Listen to me-"

"You already have."

"Nika," he says desperately, and will she just _look at him_ – " _Listen_ to me. I'll find you."

She turns back to him finally, and her green eyes are wet and resigned. "That's the second time you've told me that," she says, and then

47 wakes up.

The suddenness is like landing after a fall.

"Nika," he says, mouth dry. No one answers. Just a secret wrestled from darkness and memory.

He knows what he has to do.

/

All he has is a name, his dreams, and a conviction – no, a blind faith that a woman named Nika is real. It's not much of a lead – technically, unstable mental obsessions aren't leads at all – but giving up is not an option either. There is a furious energy thrumming under his skin and he has to do something. He has to at least try.

First, her background. Russian, if the language of her pet name teasing is anything to go by. How many times has he been to Russia? Three times, if his concussion hasn't eaten any more memories beyond that. The first was a basic civ hit, one of his earliest missions; the second was an air-to-ground interception; the third was his infamous failure where he missed the target on the first attempt and sunk himself in an twenty-four month coma when escaping from his second attempt. He can't even remember how he went down, as if his own memory refuses to accept the enormity of such humiliation. They've told him that he at least managed to terminate Bellicoff before he did. He hears that they've finished rebuilding the church now, a towering testament to his past incompetence.

47 knows what he has to do: it's what he has been avoiding for nearly half a year now. It's what he was very specifically warned not to do, from the first day he woke with an grey agony throbbing behind his eyes and a scream caught behind his teeth – _don't think of the past_. Nothing in the two years or so immediately before his coma, on pain of his brain bleeding out. His last mission to Russia scarred more than his pride.

His constant headache is a bearable thing now, crouched low enough in the back of his mind that it doesn't interfere with his work, but 47 has no illusions of what awaits him if he does this. He thinks of the possible consequence as he stripes off the tie, pushes down his shirt collar and sleeve. He thinks of it as he swipes ethanol across his shoulder. He imagines his brain unravelling, neurons swelling and bursting red; he pushes a syringe of amphetamine and oxycodone into his veins. The drugs hit almost immediately, numbing and focusing him at once, and in the second before he takes the plunge, 47 sees himself as if standing outside the car: a man in an expensively dishevelled suit with a syringe in one hand and a gun in the other, and enough firearms stockpiled in the passenger seat next to him to start a small war. He looks desperate.

Then 47 puts his foot down on the accelerator to smash through the bulletproof glass of the reception of the car factory ahead, and there isn't very much more thinking after that.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Rating is now M.

* * *

/

At the end of it, in a white room that is so familiar that the ghost of remembered bile rises in his throat, he finds his handler.

"47," the woman breathes, like a prayer. Her voice is the memory of a hundred missions. She is standing behind the surgery table, white knuckles clenching and unclenching, and she is older than he expected. She looks terrified, but she does not run or scream - she has been waiting for him, he realises. 47 ignores the instinct that snaps _Trap!_ and drags into the room the surgeon he found during his rampage through the 'factory', where the man cowers against a cupboard and continues to alternately threaten and beg. 47 ignores him.

"Diana," he says, and the woman nods quickly, her eyes fixated on the gun he has levelled at her. "I forgot you," he hears himself say, and he sounds surprised. The drugs are helping in distancing the pain screaming in his head, to the point of an out-of-body experience. His own voice sounds like a stranger's on a long distant call with particularly bad reception. Hitched and strained. "How could I forget you?"

The surgeon takes a sudden and predictable dash at him with a scalpel. "You don't need him," Diana says from behind the table, watching her colleague struggle weakly in his chokehold. 47 hesitates briefly. Then years of remembered muscle memory from listening to that same voice in his ear take over and the man is down on the ground, unconscious.

Diana stumbles backwards as he crosses the room to her. "I knew you'd come one day," she whispers. There is no fresh swell of agony from looking at her, no blinding flash migraine: he has never seen her face before. Her eyes are wild, but her voice is clear. "I told them you'd remember." 47 lowers the gun.

"Remember what?" the stranger with his voice says. " _What did I forget?_ "

"I saved the files for you," his handler says.

/

He manages to escape from the Organisation's pseudo factory quicker than it took through tear into it. It helps that the Organisation seems to have used the site only as a medical outpost for agent evaluations and experimentation rather than a training or headquartered site, which explains: one, how he is still alive; and two, why this is the place that his broken mind threw up after a week of brutal mental excavations and migraines so teeth-grindingly intense he has blacked out more than he has slept in the last few days. He thinks he recognises it as the outpost where he initially woke, after his concussion. That surgeon had been the first face he saw when he opened his eyes.

He had put two bullets in that man's head and left Diana crumpled and unconscious next to his corpse before he left. _Good luck_ , she had told him before he knocked her out. He had gripped the files and had not known how to express the depth of his gratitude, except to catch her when the sedation took effect and lay her carefully on the tiled floor as her eyes slipped shut.

And now the files are spread across the hood of his car, glaringly white under the noon sun. There is a file on his profile breakdown, a file on the Bellicoff assignment, a file on his retrieval. There is his medical file, fat with the notes of what looks to be up to five doctors.

And there is a file on her. _Nika Boronina._ She has a last name, after all. A blue-tinged snapshot of his living dream clipped to the cover. She is turning her head over her shoulder to look behind her, unaware of the camera, her mouth twisted unhappily and her eyes wary. Her hair is short. One shoulder is peeking out of the fur coat, pale and bare as the tip of an iceberg. Danger underneath. She looks like she is being pulled along by someone out of the picture, by - _Bellicoff_ , a voice in him whispers. A frisson of pain shudders warningly in his temples.

He stares and stares at the picture until the dim agony in his head loosens, settles reluctantly like sediment around this new remembered memory. He is still fairly high from the drugs. It allows him to take photo from the clip and hold it for a long while, his thumb grazing the edge of the woman captured in it. It is not much better than holding an intangible memory in his dreams. He puts the photo carefully aside.

Then 47 turns the cover of the file, and the words _WANTED, LOCATION UNKNOWN_ blaze out at him in their red stamp across the page.

/

Dreams are just a creation of his subconscious. 47 knows this. Arguing with a dream just means he's arguing with himself. 47 also knows this. There should be logically no new information to be found. Yet it is his dreams that have burned his future at the agency and that have rewarded his desperation with files that document the agency's experiments in clinically controlled amnesia on him in neat black type. He has come this far on faith of an unfinished business stolen from him, and can't doubt now. The need to see things out to the bitter end has always been in his nature.

Ironically, the headaches are what helps keep him in the shallow end of sleep, in the space between shadow and memory.

"In the space between shadow and soul," his dream corrects. She's sprawled with her head on his lap, the cover of a book raised in his face and blocking hers from view. The bench under him is metal, and verging on burning: the sparse tree over them does nothing to warm of the dry heat shimmering up from the gravel around them. His shirt collar is already damp with sweat. He finds himself watching the thin silk of NIka's dress move with her breathing with something close to envy. "As the plant that never blooms, but carries in itself the light of hidden - oh god, oh god, I'm so bored. When is this train _coming_?"

She drops the book on her face, where it lands on a muffled curse. 47 removes it after a beat. The face under it does not look grateful.

"I am going to die," says Nika. "This fucking heat. This fucking book. I swear to god-"

"You chose this," 47 feels compelled to point out. Her hair still stops just past her shoulders, but she has a fringe, this time. _This time?_ The ghost of a thought, whatever it was, melts under the heat. He cards Nika's damp fringe back. "You wanted the long way round."

"I _wanted_ to spend more time with you before you leave me again," Nika snips. "Are you even listening? I feel like I'm reading to myself, sometimes."

"I'm listening."

"No, you're not," Nika says, clearly in a mood to sulk. "You're just sitting here trying to see if my dress will go see through. You know, it's too hot to fuck again."

"I wasn't," 47 says guiltily, pulling his eyes away from the way the silk clings to the woman with her head on his lap. Unfortunately, this does nothing to relieve the fact that Nika's head is on his lap, and the heat is leaving very little to the imagination.

Nika makes a scoffing sound and rubs the side of her head meaningfully against him in a spot that is either meant to be a particularly tortuous comeback - or perhaps the first step into what could be a very pleasant afternoon after all. 47 tries not to hope. But instead of taking the book back or her clothes off, Nika's green eyes grow pensive. "I wish you would just stay," she says. "Can't you-"

"No," he says. He draws his hand back.

"You're not one of them anymore. You don't have to keep answering their contracts, there are _other_ jobs-"

"Nika-"

"No, don't _Nika_ me. Why won't you talk about this? When you come back to the vineyard, you're always look so, so… It always takes a few more days before you really come back to me. Why won't you just tell me why-"

"There's nothing _-_ " 47 stops. The ground is starting to tremble, to shimmer. It's the heat. It's the train coming, from the distance: he thinks he can hear it rumbling. The sound of metal groaning. A storm looming. "There's nothing to-" he tries again. But the words won't come out. His voice is locked.

Nika watches him, then sits up. He can feel the heat from her as she leans in, hooks her arms around his neck; can feel the way she breathes through her nose. As always, she is so terribly, imperfectly real. He can't move. Nika seems to sense this - she leans in closer, the way that he can't, and the heat between them grows even more, as if cradling a small sun between them.

 _Run_ , he wants to say. But where to? The earth beneath his feet is shaking. It feels like a nightmare.

This _is_ a nightmare.

"It's our nightmare," Nika says. Her eyes are green and serious. "I told you - it always takes longer than you think to come back to me. Ask me."

 _Where are you_ , he tries to say. Nika's mouth twists in an unhappy smile.

"Or maybe you never do come back," she says. Behind her, the background is starting to tear itself apart with a horrible noise, the earth groaning. Nika closes her eyes. "Maybe next time." She starts to pull away.

The sudden fury that knifes through him is shocking, swift and sharp as fear. _At least I'm doing something_ , he tries to say. Rages, trapped in his frozen body as Nika moves off him, already half turning away, disappointment clear on her face. _Are you even looking for me!_

The world stops shaking abruptly.

"That," Nika says quietly, into the sudden silence, "is the right question."

47 wakes up.

He pulls out the files without turning the lights on. It takes a while for his eyes to adjust to the dim light but it's there, at the end of the thin file that makes up Nika Boronina's background. A few lines that hypothesize her possible origins before her appearance as Bellicoff's whore. _From the countryside_ , suggests one bullet point. Like a vineyard.

It's enough for a start.

/

He begins sending flyers to Russian villages and vineyards, the smaller and more rural the better. There are hundreds of thousands of them, widely scattered. He pays for posters to be plastered in country towns and in glass-and-concrete municipalities; he puts up online adverts on websites for missed connections, searching singles, lost goods. Just a few words, in Cyrillic: _Needle. Cairo. Contracts. Sonnet XVII._ And in the last line: _What are your favourite things?_

It's abstract enough that it could be passed off as yet another hype-building marketing campaign, though anyone in his field with half a brain could probably guess it for what it is: a signal. Keywords like a lighthouse, beckoning in a world clouded with too much noise. It's as much as he dares to give away without revealing himself in the process - and it might still not be enough.

He gets messages almost every day, but it is all meaningless, from hopeful idiots, spambots, even other trackers. Still, he agonises over each new entry in the inbox he's set up for this purpose - quite literally, though his headaches lessen everyday. He has memorised the files liberated from the Organisation, and relives his memories in his dreams more and more each night, mostly recurring but sometimes new, but he still doesn't know what he is looking for. He doesn't know how the target named Nika Boronina will answer, if she will answer at all. It's becoming clear from his dreams that he often left her, and the target - she was getting tired of waiting.

"When will you find me?" Nika asks him, looking lost on an open-air train station platform and clutching a small carrier bag. 47 wakes and tries to remember the name of the platform, so clear in the moment when he gives her a non-answer, _when I've finished_ , in the sign behind her pale face. He never manages to.

"Can I come?" she asks him in Warsaw, through the crackle of two re-routed connections and a patchy phone line to begin with. He's in Warsaw, according to the hotel pad by the phone; she's at her home. _The vineyard_. He misses her. It's an observation rather than a feeling, something that only comes distantly from being a spectator to his own memory. He did not know it then, but it seems so obvious now, embarrassingly so. He listens to her chatter on the crackling line, to the sounds of her moving about a kitchen, the muted groan of old pipes and rush of water. She's called to tell him about the frost cracking one of the shed's windows even further, about one of her neighbours trying to sell her yet another goddamn hand-knitted jumper, about how she wore one while trying to make her own version of a _stolla_ rabbit pie last night and ended up having to throw both out. It's small talk, blatantly nothing worth using the emergency line for, but he doesn't hang up. 47 closes his eyes and listens to the sound of her voice.

It's been over a month, she says after a while. Maybe she could come see him?

He says no. The call does not end well.

"Will you stay?" Nika says. It's on the edge of a field this time, the sky ashen and vast above them like a vast grey tarp stretched from the tips of the long grass at one end to the dark silhouettes of scattered trees rising stoutly around them. She's leaning back against the trunk of one of them, her dark hair braided loosely and falling over one shoulder, her face turned up to the sky instead of him. She looks braced for the answer, resigned.

He _can_ stay but the answer gets lodged in his throat. It is hard to live like this sometimes, in the same place for weeks, cut off from the world. He chose the vineyard precisely for this reason but it still grates to live so completely against what he has been ingrained to do, the restlessness building and feeling of blindness growing until he has to leave again, if only for a while.

Nika seems to take his silence as answer. But she only smiles, serene and faint. She doesn't sulk when he goes to her, puts his hand on her waist and waits for resistance, for any resentfulness; she doesn't swear at him when he traces the tie of her wrap dress up to its knot and starts to loosen it. She puts her arms around his neck and lets him open up her dress, lifts her face to kiss him back, sweet and deep. As always, Nika's loveliness in moments like this is nearly unbearable, and he has to remember with some effort to slow, to pause every now and then to check if she's happy to continue, genuinely happy.

She's already wet when he slips his fingers in her though, and when he starts to kneel, she pulls him up again by his shirt collar instead and pulls him closer, insistent. He lifts her up against the trunk and she wraps her legs tight around his hips, both of them sighing at the perfect pressure, and there is only one fleeting moment when it seemed like it might go bad, when he stopped them both to clumsily shrug off and pull his coat around her, between her thin back and the tree, and Nika's face crumpled suddenly. But then her face had smoothened almost as immediately, back to that faint, calm smile again, and then Nika had pressed the soft naked line of her body against him and he stopped thinking very shortly after.

He thinks back now on this memory, that smile. _Will you stay_ , she'd asked. He'd given her silence as his answer and then he'd fucked her as if that might comfort her, despite her unusual quietness, that damnable smile. Perhaps that was the last time he saw her before they found him. And now, in the inane chatter from strangers in his inbox, in the dead ends of his networks on the streets, perhaps she is giving him the same answer too.


	3. Chapter 3

The months pass. His messages lead nowhere. It disappears into the vast carelessness of the world, the silence of the dark web, and Nika does not tug back on the threads he leaves for her.

Perhaps she doesn't know how. Perhaps she doesn't want to. It's hard to say. His dreams fade, surge again, merge into each other; his headaches lessen until it is almost nothing, just an echo of pain in the automatic clench of his teeth.

He could give into despair, he supposes. A more romantic man might indulge in that. But 47 is not that sort of man, and maybe he drinks a little more, takes on longer jobs with fewer breaks in between, but nothing else really changes.

Well - except for no longer being of the employ of his former organisation, and having to evade their ongoing attempts at re-capture. That helps to fill his days with distraction as well.

Winter comes to Europe with a sudden vicious bite and his dreams change, grow heavier and harder. They have the same feel as walking on the edge of the roof of a building: the dreading and yearning to step off. Nika starts to appear at the edge of his vision even during the day, the ghost of a dream of an incomprehensible decision that he still cannot clearly remember making. She's in the passenger seat of his car, leaning forward to scroll through the radio channels. She's smoking in the balcony of his hotel room, golden-lit and bored. She grows quieter in his dreams and hallucinations, as if in response to the snow blanketing the real world. She flickers back sometimes to an early version of herself, when her dark hair brushes the curve of her jaw, but generally her hair grows steadily longer in each snapshot vision. Her eyes grow dimmer. She laughs less. It becomes clear that for some amorphous reason, they are drifting apart - that they were drifting apart - and 47 does not know how to combat it.

He gets used to having an inconstant companion - and it appears that past-him does too, if the abrupt relocation of the backdrop of his dreams from the vineyard to the various overpriced hotels and rundown motels of the world has anything to say about it. It appears that the solution of past-him to a subdued Nika was to bring her along on more of his trips.

Of course, the problem of bringing Nika along in the past is that she now tends to inconveniently resurface in his present when he least expects it.

 _How long will it be before you come get me_ , Nika says by his ear. 47 jerks before he manages to smooth away the movement. Around him, the club pulses with its wild rhythm, the maddened heartbeat of it pounding through his bones and teeth. The target has ordered a girl for him with a sneering generosity, smiling unpleasantly as the girl twists and strips between his knees. She is very young.

The target's smile widens at his aborted movement. "Uh uh uh, touching costs more," he says. Shouts, really, to be heard above the music. Charming. "But if you're willing to join my little enterprise, maybe you'd like a glimpse into some of our perks…"

The man nods at the girl. She stops bending before him and goes to kneel before the target, near naked and unflinching against the sticky floor. Her smile is fixed.

47 looks appropriately awestruck and leans in as if for a better view, one hand absently drawing the heavy curtain across their booth. The bodyguards standing on the edge outside don't even look twice.

Later, in the scalding heat of his shower, he thinks back on the vividness of the hallucination. _How long will it be before you come get me_ , she'd said. The young stripper, arching and twisting. Her eyes hadn't even been green.

But Nika had been there, in the girl and yet right next to him, their same resigned fear blurring them into the same creature in the space between one blink and next. _I just want to know,_ she's said next, _so I can prepare myself._ Defensive, wheedling. Past-him hadn't seen the fear; had only thought that she was being difficult, demanding more information than he was comfortable giving as always. The absolute fool. _I can help you better if you tell me how long you'll leave me alone with him, I'll do whatever it takes, I promise, I. I just want to know._

And now it comes: the memories, resurfacing like bubbles boiling to the surface, bursting hot and bright as if they'd always there. He had used her as a distraction, of course. To redirect the attention of targets and their predictable libido, or to create similar weak points in their guards and associates. At first for just one mission, which went well because of it - and so he had asked her again for another, and another.

No, not asked: ordered. He had ordered her. 47 hadn't seen it as such, back then, but now looking back - Christ. He remembers even thinking that this perhaps could help them both overcome this incomprehensible and growing distance between them, if she could be part of his missions. After all, didn't people do this - share their lives? This was all the life he had.

47 spends a sleepless night on the balcony with a cold whiskey in his hand and his next target open in a file on his lap. He doesn't read a word.

The next day, he pulls the flyers and cancels the ads. He books a flight to the States for after this upcoming contract ends, even though he doesn't yet have a contract there and has been largely Europe-bound since he woke from his coma - no, from his _surgery_. He runs ten miles, forces himself not to think of anything related to the past, and reads the damn file.

It's time to start anew, 47 thinks as he waits to be vetted and cleared. Buying illegal arms can be a surprisingly regulated and strictly civilised business, when run by a true professional, and the Moroccan whose den that 47 is waiting in is one of the best. He'll need the best for this next job; for that, 47 is willing to stand in a room surrounded by surveillance cameras, waiting to be vetted through to the inner den of arms.

He tries to look calm, without showing the edge of recklessness whitening his knuckles, restless in the soles of his feet. After all, he is being monitored right now. And it is true that it's time for him to start anew - the same way it is true that he should give the ghost named Nika Boronina the same chance to do so.

47 thinks that once he has had time to accept this beyond just intellectually, this bitter wildness thrumming under his skin will fade. Perhaps one day, even his dreams will too.

An alarm buzzes. He's cleared.

The heavy door unlocks with a soft click: 47 pushes in.

Inside, it takes a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light. A clever tactic. He still perfectly still, deliberately so, until the familiar surroundings come into sharp focus: the walls lined with weaponry of deadly beauty, neat and slick and compact. Waist-tall and dimly lit display cases placed tastefully in rows leading up to the long steel counter at the end of the room, like a church for hushed, darker things.

Behind the counter, the Morrocan stands waiting: one of the most dangerous men in the world.

"Ah, Mr 47," he says, brisk. "It's about time. You've come for Nika Boronina at last."

* * *

/

A/N: I found this half-started scrap in my documents and had the sudden and irresistible urge to continue this story. What am I still doing on this ship? Well if you're still on it too, I'd love to hear from you :)


	4. Chapter 4

_/_

 _I had a dog when I was young,_ 47 told Nika once. They were lying out in a field, the air smelling of fresh grass and a cool shower just passed. It was a pleasant night and Nika had complained it was too stuffy to sleep in the car, so they'd pulled out some old blankets from the boot and spread them out on the grass besides the cooling car. They'd paper-wrapped pitas and cold lamb for dinner, and Nika had talked idly through most of it: of her recent attempts at growing olives; the problems with pests in the garden; her adventures with her childhood pet chipmunk.

 _Tishka_ , he had said; and her startled gratification at his remembering her pet's name prompted him to continue, haltingly, _I had a dog - when I was young._

He rarely spoke of his past. He didn't have the ability to camouflage pain into the mundane and extract pleasure from the ordinary. Nika's gifts in these area far exceeded his own, but still she listened hungrily when he continued, _his ears were orange; he was given to me as part of my training_. She was always greedy to learn more about him.

When he finally woke from that dream, it was a gradual awakening that felt like rising from a deep swim. Nika's soft-eyed understanding still warm as a heated coal within him.

Up until this moment, he had been prepared to only see that look again in his dreams.

"Mr 47," the Moroccan says. "You _are_ here for Nika Boronina?"

A beat - then 47 is at the counter before he remembers moving. "Yes," he says. "You know where she is? _Do you have her?_ "

The smaller man raises an eyebrow. "Of course. You gave her to me."

His stomach drops. It takes a few seconds to regroup, during which the other man watches him carefully. "I want her back," 47 manages at last.

The arms dealer ignores that. "I've heard someone's been using your name to try to find her," he says, as if to himself. "A great deal of noise for a perfectly unremarkable mark with no real skills or information, I thought. But that alone made her an asset worth keeping. But now I see it really was just you, again." He tsks and shakes his head. "How disappointing."

"What do you want?"

The Moroccan smiles faintly at him. On the cool counter, his fingers tap an idle rhythm. "Why didn't you just come straight here?"

"Name your price."

"Why do you want her back now?"

" _Name your price_."

The tapping stops. The Moroccan leans in. "I'll release her back to you, Mr 47, if you can answer just one question. Do you think you can rein yourself in enough to refrain from jumping over this counter and killing us both in the process to do that? Good, here it is: why did you give her to me in the first place, if you clearly want her back so badly now?"

The silence stretches like a high wire. The arms dealer is right, about killing them both in the process: 47 knows he is swift enough to get to the other man before he's stopped, but he is in unfriendly territory and he would likely follow the Morrocan a split second after his bullet enters the other man's forehead.

Besides, his loathing is directed at the wrong person. It isn't the Moroccan that 47 is furious with.

"She was a liability," he says at last. "It made sense to dispose of her."

His dreams haven't developed this far, but it's not a hard to guess why he would have done it. Even now, 47 knows it is still the logical decision to make.

The Moroccan hums thoughtfully. He nods once. He leans back. The edge of violence in the air eases down a breath.

"Some might say she is even more of a liability now," the other man observes.

"Perhaps," 47 says shortly. "Your price?"

The Moroccan laughs. "How much do you have? No, don't answer. You haven't answered a single of my questions correctly so far after all. Shall I help? Listen carefully. You didn't come straight here because you didn't know she was here. I'm guessing that you didn't know even when you stepped through my door. You want her back now because – well, that is between God and yourself. And you gave her to me, so many months ago now, because I accepted _your_ price. You paid me for the care and hiding of Nika Boronina. Though I must say that your collection of your cargo is well overdue."

47's head is buzzing badly. But it is not just a headache, or grey static: there are voices, blurred and mingled, echoing in the aching chamber of his head. _Don't leave me with them_ , Nika begs. _At least take me home._ Her fingers gripping his arm: angry, scared. He had shaken her off. _It's better this way,_ he'd said. _I can't afford to take you now._ What he had meant: I can't afford to lose you. It was a bitter and largely one-sided argument that escalated all the way until he left her drugged and unconscious in the Moroccan's vetting room, disgusted with her lack of rationality and his own inability to manage it well. At that time, the Organisation had finally made him an offer to return to the fold, and he had been so sure that he would be able to negotiate a deal and return quickly. Arranging her temporary captivity with the Moroccan had just been an instinct of precaution. He had been so sure he could prove to them that his liability could be contained, kept apart from his professionalism.

He had been such a fucking fool.

His voice comes out thickly: "You know what happened?"

"No," the Morrocan says. "But I have heard whispers, and I'm starting to suspect which were right. By the way, your nose is bleeding."

47 wipes a hand under his nose; there is a smear of dark red on the back of his hand. _Brain trauma_ , a voice whispers. There had been warnings in his medical file of the dangers of reversal, of overload. He blinks the spots away from his vision. "I want to see her," he says. His voice sounds ragged, strained. "I need to - I'm here to collect."

"We agreed on four weeks. It has been over two years. By all rights," the Morrocan says, serene, "your claim to her ended a long time ago."

A shocking sound: 47's fist slamming on the steel counter. There is no pain, no alarm at his own loss of control: 47 can only see the Moroccan standing on the other side of counter, can only feel the roar in his skull like a storm of bees and a violent desperation that tastes like copper in his mouth. "I want to see her," he repeats. He is aware he is on dangerous ground, to threaten this man in breach of the wordless rules that form a cage stronger than earth around this room. He does not care. "You have no - I have given up _everything_ for this."

"Have you?" The smaller man's eyes flickers up and down him, cool as the rain. "She tells me you couldn't, the last time."

"How - what has she -"

"Come back in three days." The Morrocan seems abruptly tired of the conversation. He shakes his head a little, as if pityingly; a lifetime of iron control stops 47 from reaching across the counter to shake the man bodily just in time. "Perhaps you may see her then."

He starts to move to the door at the behind the counter, clearly intending to leave 47 standing behind in silent and futile rage. He pauses at the door. "My wife is fond of her, you know." _And I am fond of my wife_ , 47 hears the heavy implication even through the fog of shock and anger. "I'll let you walk through my doors when you come back. But whether Nika Boronina will see you: well, that is entirely up to her."

The Morrocan leaves. And 47 is alone in the room once more.

/

* * *

A/N: Thank you for all your lovely comments, dear readers - delighted to have company on this small ship! :)


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